Link to Part 1
During my first year or so of stay-at-home parenting, I went through something of an identity crisis. I had stripped away so many layers of myself until all that was left was “parent” and “stay-at-home Dad”, and beyond those labels I didn’t know who I was. It was embarrassing, and kind of emasculating, primarily because I had no frame of reference for my situation; nothing in my more than three decades of life experience normalized any of it for me. My mom stayed home to raise me. My aunts stayed home to raise my cousins. The men all went out and worked.
In fact, the only stay-at-home Dad I was familiar with was Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom (1983), a film about a man who is laid off from his engineering job at the same time as his wife starts an advertising career, leaving him to take care of their three children. The entire concept of the film is Look at that guy changing diapers, watching soap operas, and making dinner! As is understandable for the time period in which it was released, the situation is depicted as a humorous curiosity, with the expected “Aren’t dirty diapers gross?”/“I accidentally set the kitchen on fire while trying to cook”/”I don’t know how to navigate a supermarket” bits.
Mr. Mom is a cute film that I remember enjoying when I was a little kid. But I can admit that by the time my second relative or acquaintance referred to me as Mr. Mom I wanted to go ballistic. I was getting over the sudden cataclysm that turned my life upside down. I was still processing the loss of my identity and my forced acquisition of a new one that I wasn’t yet sure I was suited to and couldn’t have imagined I’d ever take pride in. I felt embarrassed and inadequate for not being the breadwinner. I felt guilty over denying my wife the ability to be present for all the baby and toddler milestones.
With the guilt came self-recrimination: If I’d just worked a little harder, promoted my business more vigorously than I did, and built a larger regular clientele, we might be sufficiently well-off to afford our own insurance. Then my wife could have stayed home with the baby, or maybe even retired and lived a life of luxury in her late thirties! She would have been the envy of all her friends and relatives!
The thing that eluded me as I fought to escape the morass of cognitive distortions was the fact that I had in fact worked as hard as I could, promoted my business as vigorously as I could, and had as many clients as I could handle. And even if I’d been able to keep that fact in mind, I’m sure the voice in my head would’ve said, “Yeah, but what if you’d worked just a little bit harder?” At that point it was less about logically analyzing my past choices and more about beating myself up for not being what I thought I was supposed to be. It had a major effect on my mental health, though I suspect I’m still not aware of the full extent of it.
In addition to the well-meaning but clueless turds who called me Mr. Mom, I quickly grew disgruntled with the narrow-minded retail clerks who asked if it was “Daddy’s day with the baby” because holy shit, a grown man out in public with a baby? Without the mother present? Should we call CPS right now or wait until the baby loses an eye? I suppose current-day Jack would tell these people to fuck off, or at least express umbrage over their conventional, traditional worldview. But 2010 Jack wasn’t convinced they were wrong to ogle the freakshow.
Oh, footnote to the above: Mr. Mom was written by none other than John Hughes. On the strength of his script, Universal Studios gave him a three-picture deal. Had he not written Mr. Mom, he might never have directed Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Weird Science (1985).
Up next: The Good Life to Which I Refer, wherein I realize that I’m actually crushing it and the whole thing probably goes to my head.
Parenting
It [was] a Good Life, Part 1: When My Life Changed
Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I was a stay-at-home Dad for years. Many posts from that era reference the challenges of parenting, especially the difficulty in maintaining an active and adventurous sex life when you’ve got a new baby who never sleeps.
When my daughter was born, I agreed to put my social and professional lives on indefinite hold for the sake of my family. I was afraid that I was ill-suited to the task; prior to my daughter’s birth I’d never changed a diaper and I’d held a baby perhaps fewer than five times. Although my somewhat shaky upbringing wasn’t something I was completely aware of at the time, I knew how high the stakes were that this child be raised to be a functional adult. I knew that if I was going to do this, I couldn’t screw it up.
So yeah, I was afraid. On some level, maybe I didn’t even want to do it. After all, I was self-employed, and giving up day-to-day operation of my business was as scary as leaving my daughter with an unfamiliar babysitter would have been. Beyond that, being a stay-at-home dad required me to give up the home I loved and move hours away, to a much more expensive area with no predetermined living arrangements. In this locale there was no way we’d ever be able to afford to buy or even rent a house comparable to the one we were moving out of.
(The monthly rent on the modest three-bedroom, two-bath house [i.e. smaller than the house we left behind] in a decent but not affluent suburban neighborhood where we lived for a year and a half immediately following the move was just south of $3,000. Compare this to the contemporary national average of $1,083.)
I lamented the imminent loss of my house. The two-car garage. The backyard. The private home office I’d set up for myself in an unused bedroom. The pool table. That’s right, I had a pool table, and I had a room dedicated solely to playing pool while listening to music and sipping top-shelf liquor. Though I’d bought the pool table second-hand, it needed no restoration. Still, I maintained the mahogany and regularly cleaned the rich burgundy felt, and ensured both the sticks and the balls were properly cared for as well. It was the sort of extravagance I eagerly allowed myself as a childless married person, but at this point in my life I can’t even grasp that level of grandeur. It feels otherworldly.
So I had to make an adjustment. Or, more accurately, a series of adjustments. It was a major life change that more than one mental health professional has categorized as “trauma”, even though I’m hesitant to refer to it as such. Hell, my wife and I were going to be living under the same roof for the first time in nearly a year! Sleeping in the same bed! Kissing good night rather than texting good night! There are people who’d kill for that kind of “trauma”, my current self included.
It hurt to lose things I’d worked hard to achieve. Accomplishments that, in my mind, I had no right to ever have expected of myself. These were things I was proud of, things that made me me, and to let go of them or even to step away from them hurt me. I think I eased the pain by telling myself that it was just temporary, that someday we’d be back in the same house (which was being rented out in our absence). This was obviously a lie, and I probably knew that at the time. Still, this was the only way forward. My wife’s job included health benefits and mine did not. She had to work; I had to be the one to raise the kid.
Up next: Mr. Mom, wherein I relive the initial trials and tribulations of that SAHD life.
What’s Wrong With a Little Television?
Image found at Vitamin Vee
As the parents of a baby, Jack and I feel that we are under a lot of pressure to raise our daughter in a responsible manner. We have seen children in our own families reared by parents who are lazy, irresponsible, or otherwise unsuited to the job. Unwilling to see our daughter grow up to be an overindulged, entitled brat used to having everything handed to her and unwilling to challenge herself, we took lessons from these parents, and forced ourselves not to make the same mistakes they did.
As a result of this, one of the things we have tried to limit is our daughter’s television-watching time. We feel that if she is constantly placed in front of the TV, she will be unable to sit still and amuse herself without it. Rather than being able to entertain herself quietly on a long car ride, she will insist upon watching cartoons or other children’s programming. While having TVs and DVD players in one’s car is certainly very common today, it’s not something we want to expose our child to, at least not before she’s two years old. While we have no problem with it in theory, both Jack and I survived our childhoods just fine without needing to watch television during a car ride. Long drives would usually find us reading books in the back seats of our parents’ cars, and we would like our daughter to be the same way, as with any luck this will nurture in her a love of reading, which she is already beginning to demonstrate through a rudimentary interest in books.
Yes, we let her watch television sometimes. She likes the typical Nickelodeon or Disney Channel cartoons that a not-quite-toddler might watch. She dances when she hears their theme songs, and points to the screen and says the characters’ names. Sometimes when we are doing other things, she asks to watch television. Depending on a number of factors we might let her, or we might read her a story or play outside with her instead. Our aim is not to teach her that television is bad (we certainly have no aversion to watching it) but to give her a well-rounded upbringing that involves a variety of experiences. And it seems to be working. Not only is she interested in books, but she regularly asks us to read stories to her. She loves it when we take her on walks or to visit one of the parks in our town, and she is also content to play quietly with her toys.
The purpose of this entry is not self-promotion. We try not to judge other parents unless their failure is so obvious and massive that we can’t avoid it. As parents, neither Jack nor I feel that we have all the answers. But I’m a teacher, and I don’t work during summer. This year, while I was off for two and a half months, Jack and I got accustomed to sex on a daily basis. In fact, some days we had sex twice: Once when the baby took her afternoon nap, and again when she fell asleep for the night. We’ve had plenty of sex since the new school year began, but with the exception of weekends, it’s all been first thing in the morning, or at night just before bed. I like having sex right in the middle of the day. There’s something exciting about stopping what we’re doing, throwing off all of our clothes (or leaving some on), and giving into that persistent need for immediate sexual release.
Jack spent much of the day yesterday sending me very erotic text messages and e-mails. This was incredibly hot but also very frustrating as I was unable to respond. Because of this, I spent my day pretty worked up. As I prepared to leave for the day, I sent Jack a text message to see whether the baby was napping. I was nervous as I waited for his reply, because I work about forty minutes from home, and given her normal sleep schedule she is usually awake by the time I leave, or at the very latest by the time I get home. To my relief, he said she was, and I crossed my fingers that she would remain asleep until an hour after I arrived. Actually, I probably could have gotten off in five minutes. I was that turned on.
When I exited the freeway near our house, I found myself at a stoplight where I sent Jack another text. He said that she was still asleep, and I exhaled. At this point she’d been asleep for almost three hours. She almost never sleeps so long, and while my optimistic side hoped that she was simply catching up on sleep after a somewhat restless night, my pessimistic side said to be prepared to hear the sounds of a playful, happy and very much awake baby when I walked in the door. As I drove the last couple blocks to our house, I prepared myself for this inevitability, and looked on the bright side: While I’d been distracted for much of the day by thoughts of Jack’s cock, I missed my daughter as well, and I was glad to have the opportunity to spend time with her.
When I walked through the front door I was met with silence. No crying – or laughing – baby. No music. No sounds of activity. No television playing a movie Jack had decided to watch while the baby slept. I couldn’t believe our luck! She’d slept for more than three hours at this point. I set down my purse and my keys on the couch, and excitedly headed down the hall to join my husband, who I could see sitting on our bed, waiting for me. He was naked. As I neared our bedroom I stripped down to nothing as well. I imagined what he’d do to me, what we’d do to each other, and I found my wetness hard to contain. I needed an orgasm, and I needed it soon. It wouldn’t take me long. Then the baby woke up just as I passed her bedroom.
Fuck it, I thought as I detoured to her crib and lifted her into my arms. She was glad to see me, and I held her, kissed her, and talked to her for a few minutes. Then I carried her into the TV room, sat her down, and turned on the television. One of the cartoons she likes was on. I left lots of books and toys within reach in case she got bored with the show. I don’t think we were being irresponsible. We weren’t parking her in front of the television so that we could get drunk or engage in dangerous behavior. We just wanted sex. Especially me. I stayed with her in the TV room to make sure she was fine being on her own, and then I joined Jack in the bedroom and shut the door.
-Jill